My New Yamaha VMAX® SHO™

I’ve been kicking around what boat I was going to run this year, and I finally decided last week that I’m putting my new Yamaha VMAX SHO four stroke engine on the back of a Ranger® Z521. In all the test drives I did with the new VMAX SHO engine I ran it on a Ranger® Z520, which is a boat I’ve ran for the last two years (one with a VMAX 250 and one with w F225 four stroke), so I’m very familiar with that boat.

I was actually having a hard time deciding whether I would run the Z520 again or going with the Z521, and after running the new engine at Bridgeport, I felt that the engine pushed the 21-footer around so easily, that I opted for the larger boat and the luxury of extra space and a little larger running surface.

Being used to running the Z520, I knew all the aspects of how that model drives, like the top speed with different motors, how it handles, comes out of the hole and all the different important aspects of acceleration. Yet, when I ran one with the new Yamaha VMAX SHO four stroke, it didn’t take but about a minute for me to realize that this was a whole new ballgame. It accelerated way faster, came out of the hole like nothing I have ever seen before, and the top speed was better than the HPDI® two stroke, and this was a four stroke engine.

While driving the SHO on a bunch of different boat models at the Yamaha Test Facility in Bridgeport, Alabama, I’d take people for test rides and they’d get in the boat and whether I drove or they did, I could see it in their eyes when they realized that this was something different, something special, a real game changer. In most cases it took only one or two minutes for them to comment to me that this engine was like nothing they’d ever seen from a four stroke before.

With the Ranger® Z520 and the Yamaha 250 VMAX SHO, at 5800 rpms, I was averaging 73.2 to 73.4 mph, which varied on whether I was going up or down river and running into or against the wind. I’ve had that combination running as fast as 77 mph, but that was with only me in the boat.

Read the full post @ yamahagamechanger.com